Distributed Power Africa (DPA) this week unveiled a 1.2MW solar installation at Liquid Telecom’s Campus in Midrand, South Africa –one of the renewable energy company’s largest projects to date in South Africa.

The company, which continues to expand its clean energy offer to commercial & industrial businesses across sub-Sahara Africa, also recently announced a major deal with Tesla to bring Power walls into Zimbabwe as a part of its telecoms power solution.

“This solar deployment to Liquid Telecom Midrand is a major development in improving energy security for critical users like data centres,” said DPA Africa CEO Norman Moyo.

“It will improve their power security, and energy efficiencies. The power needs of data centres tend to be heavy and sensitive, and DPA’s engineering hopes to provide a reliable power supply to keep this operation running with no downtime,” Moyo said.

DPA designed and is engineering the Liquid Telecom Midrand solar plant as a combined carport and rooftop solution that will come complete with a real-time power monitoring system. This initiative is in line with the South Africa government policy to embrace renewable energy as a practical source of power – complimenting government’s efforts to improve reliable power supply to the country.

Reshaad Sha, CEO Liquid Telecom South Africa, said: “Using energy-saving and environmentally friendly sources of energy is becoming increasingly important and companies should start looking at making them a standard practice. Through this partnership with DPA, we are embracing cleaner sources of energy for improved information security to achieve both cost and energy efficiencies.

“We are also excited to draw value from our real estate, as we turn our roofs and carports into energy sources for our businesses, which is a real return on investment for us.”

Distributed Power Africa provides solar solutions at zero upfront investment on a lease agreement and guarantees customers no technical risk through the best technology. As part of the lease DPA takes full responsibility for engineering, procurement, installation, monitoring, maintenance, warranties and insurance.

DPA has this year successfully deployed significant solar projects in Zimbabwe, Kenya and South Africa at a time Zimbabwe is battling an acute power crisis that has seen aggressive load shedding of on the grid power of up to 16 hours per day.

“We extend such opportunities to all businesses, and we particularly encourage real estate owners with land idle lying and dead roofs, to leverage on this by turning these into power sources that also generate revenue for themselves,” Moyo said.